that things are more complicated than you [can] think. It's hard to accept uncertainty, and in the course of daily life I suppose we have to act certain about some things. But I think we often run into problems thinking things to be so clear-cut. We like to simplify. We have to simplify. It's evolutionarily advantageous for our survival (like a local optimum). It's efficient. Conserves energy. Human understanding has its limits, so we have to bend the world to fit within the boundaries of our understanding. That's the only way it all makes sense. I'm suspicious when things make too much sense. Something's bent.
None of this is remotely practical, but I'm through with practicality. If I were a machine, I'd be doing economics instead of philosophy.
Everything I know or think I know is used to configure a framework for "seeing" the world. If I take the things I know to be less clear-cut, more uncertain, less stable, I get a more "open" view of the world (as contrasted with the popular phrase "narrow-minded"). The world opens up, if you like. It's easier to slide my knowledge around and reconfigure new and more sophisticated frameworks for thinking and perceiving the world. I don't know what truth we can aspire to. We have to realize that we can't help but bend things to make sense. Human understanding covers a fairly wide range (to what do I compare it to?), but a finite range none the less. All we have are interpretations. Interpretations are never "wrong." It's not wrong that we bend things, and I don't see it as a condition to be overcome. That I see it, however, is important.
Things that do make "perfect" sense to us most likely only do so because they are parts of a system, a worldview, that we invented -- that we've bent into shape because we find it meaningful. Myths. Sometimes myths we live by.
So I'm building up a tolerance for uncertainty. You may not be thick if you don't understand the world; you may not be thick if it doesn't make sense. Don't always let yourself bend it, whatever it is you're trying to comprehend. Sometimes allow things to seem unstable.
Your brain may fall out; I don't know. I think it'll be okay if you're open-minded but pay attention to your feelings.
I really like when something prompts a radical alteration in my perspective of things. My experience from then on is deepened and more attuned. Each time I am repeatedly aware of many more uncertainties as well. My worldview has to be ever reconfigured to make meaning of particular uncertainties, and each time inevitably reconfigured in such a way that a different set of uncertainties crop up (sometimes "tainting" ideas and views which used to stand firm and unchallenged).
That's what I reckon.
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Well, OK. If you say so, I reckon you're right. I think. Huh?
This-
"The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect." (Bertrand Russell)
...sounds familiar.
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